aaaw I feel all special.
Feb. 13th, 2007 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
orangerfulOne of my buddies from the Star Wars club just invited me to do a podcast! They're trying to get a female perspective on the fandom for their roundtable discussion. It's so cool that they asked me! Now I just have to work on not giggling and forming complete thoughts.
Seriously though, I'm really interested in this. I've wanted to try out podcasting but I couldn't really think of anything I would want to talk about or who the heck would bother listening! I mean, I don't listen to them so how could I know how to make one? So this will be fun because someone else gets to do all the hard work (mixing, recording, editing etc) and I just get to babble. My kind of gig.
Plus, we all know how much I love my fandoms and that I enjoy being a girl. Or trying to weave my way thru fandoms without revealing I'm a girl. I might have mentioned this before, but I kept the name "orangerful" because it was so ambiguous. So when I would end up on message boards, I could be undercover for awhile as I established myself in the group. Only after I felt that everyone was convinced I was a "true fan" would I let slip I was a girl.
Clearly, this wasn't as big a deal in the Joss fandoms, which seem to be dominated by women. But in a fandom like Star Wars, it just became second nature. I would be "orangerful" or "Sam". I don't know why it is, but when a guy is a fan of a sci-fi or fantasy series, everyone just assumes he's a total geek and that's normal. If a girl is a fan of a sci-fi or fantasy series, there's an alterier motive - one of the guys must be hot. She couldn't possibly appreciate it the same way that the men do. Anyone have a clue why this comes up at all?
Or maybe it's just that people still raise their daughters on pink ponies and keep them away from spacemen. I went both ways - I had my box of My Little Ponies and my Star Wars toys and I had them mingle. I mean, why wouldn't their be a planet in the Star Wars 'verse covered in ponies? It could happen!
And it's true, because I am a woman, I focus on the way women are portrayed in the series. I'm a bit more protective of Leia, since I grew up with her. When the critics start to pick on her, I usually brush them off as being cynical. I can usually defend her for longer than I can defend poor Padme. Perhaps it's because Leia's love story is a bit more three dimensional than Padme's. We can see why Leia would be attracted to someone like Han, and we can see why Han is attractive. Padme, on the other hand, is WAY too good for Anakin and there's not a whole lot going for Anakin, apart from his prettyness.
Whoa, that got out of hand. Anyway, fandom ladies - you guys want to put in your two cents? I would love to hear what you have to say on the subject (Star Wars or other fandoms), I can use it when brainstorming things to say for this podcast, whenever it may be.
Seriously though, I'm really interested in this. I've wanted to try out podcasting but I couldn't really think of anything I would want to talk about or who the heck would bother listening! I mean, I don't listen to them so how could I know how to make one? So this will be fun because someone else gets to do all the hard work (mixing, recording, editing etc) and I just get to babble. My kind of gig.
Plus, we all know how much I love my fandoms and that I enjoy being a girl. Or trying to weave my way thru fandoms without revealing I'm a girl. I might have mentioned this before, but I kept the name "orangerful" because it was so ambiguous. So when I would end up on message boards, I could be undercover for awhile as I established myself in the group. Only after I felt that everyone was convinced I was a "true fan" would I let slip I was a girl.
Clearly, this wasn't as big a deal in the Joss fandoms, which seem to be dominated by women. But in a fandom like Star Wars, it just became second nature. I would be "orangerful" or "Sam". I don't know why it is, but when a guy is a fan of a sci-fi or fantasy series, everyone just assumes he's a total geek and that's normal. If a girl is a fan of a sci-fi or fantasy series, there's an alterier motive - one of the guys must be hot. She couldn't possibly appreciate it the same way that the men do. Anyone have a clue why this comes up at all?
Or maybe it's just that people still raise their daughters on pink ponies and keep them away from spacemen. I went both ways - I had my box of My Little Ponies and my Star Wars toys and I had them mingle. I mean, why wouldn't their be a planet in the Star Wars 'verse covered in ponies? It could happen!
And it's true, because I am a woman, I focus on the way women are portrayed in the series. I'm a bit more protective of Leia, since I grew up with her. When the critics start to pick on her, I usually brush them off as being cynical. I can usually defend her for longer than I can defend poor Padme. Perhaps it's because Leia's love story is a bit more three dimensional than Padme's. We can see why Leia would be attracted to someone like Han, and we can see why Han is attractive. Padme, on the other hand, is WAY too good for Anakin and there's not a whole lot going for Anakin, apart from his prettyness.
Whoa, that got out of hand. Anyway, fandom ladies - you guys want to put in your two cents? I would love to hear what you have to say on the subject (Star Wars or other fandoms), I can use it when brainstorming things to say for this podcast, whenever it may be.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-14 02:49 am (UTC)The Sunrise scene in A New Hope was always my favorite scene, and I think what made me so into the series. There was an interview given with some bigshot or another, I think Rick McCallum and I think he said that that scene embodied the sense of adventure in all boys and a yearning for big and better things. I found that entirely offensive because that's really what I think is wrong with the sci fi world, people assume that those kinds of desires for adventure, excitement, heroic measures, aren't meant for everyone. That it's a boy thing that girls wouldn't understand.
That was pretty babbly, but I guess what I wish people would understand about girls in fandom is that we're not different from boys in fandom. We're not there for space cock, we're there for the same reasons. Which is why I find it obnoxious that it's so hard to find a female in video games who isn't in bikini armor, and that's why something like Star Wars doesn't turn me off like BloodRayne, because in the movies (gold bikini aside), books and games there are so many female characters who fight right along side the men. A woman's place isn't really talked about in Star Wars, and I like that, it's just a given that they're equal, even though they're pretty.
Not to mention it's just an easy story to get caught up in. A lot of people consider things like epic poetry and reading to be girly. Star Wars has the same plot as a lot of those epics, so if one's girly, so is the other.
/babble